Live Automation: Keeping a Cutting Edge with Ignition

Reliable Data Supports Cleaner Energy Initiative For 50 States

One of South Jersey Industries’ (SJI) key initiatives is to deliver on its commitment to provide cleaner energy. The generation of renewable natural gas facilities at dairy farms is a key production commitment for SJI. A modular production facility is required at each farm site, near the raw materials. The speed of deployment and number of sites involved demands the establishment of a universal architecture and platform for the integration of control and enterprise systems at the company. In addition, the distributed nature of the system and criticality to the energy infrastructure demand the highest level of security and reliability. Finally, SJI requires that all these sites be centrally monitored from an enterprise SCADA system that will also historize data for financial and regulatory reporting. The central importance of reliable data for continual operational financial justification proves the common Digital Transformation adage that “data is the new gas.” SJI Industries tasked Automated Control Concepts (ACC) to build a foundation for the application of key control and information technologies and systems that will allow the organization to realize world-class Digital Transformation and create a secure data pipeline. In doing so, SJI would be able to provide users at all levels of the organization with access to control system information. Through the strategic application of industrial information technologies, significant benefits are realized in the following areas: reliability, availability, visibility, and security. ACC successfully built and deployed this operational technology stack on Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform, which let ACC establish a scalable architecture to support plants/sites of varying sizes and complexity. The integration of data from the site’s control level, through various secure (DMZ) network layers to the corporate core network and cloud providers, has been addressed.

New Control System Improves Safety And Compliance For Pharmaceutical Company

Initially, Zendal approached Optomation Systems to tackle their needs for monitoring unmanned storage units holding pharmaceutical final products for their customers. When Optomation introduced Ignition, it rapidly evolved into a larger project with a broader scope to encompass the data acquisition of varied equipment, process control and supervision, alarm notification, data historization, and automatic report generation. The main objective of the project was to implement a system that acts as a data repository for the information collected from the dedicated equipment in the different production areas and auxiliary services, both to satisfy regulatory requirements and prove compliance with CDMO obligations to customers. In addition, the system integrated new production areas into the system and expanded functionality to include control and supervision of several processes. Field devices and sensors are connected to controllers that execute automated sequences, and from Ignition, operators have full access to the operation, just like a traditional SCADA system.

Ashley Automation Boosts Efficiency

Ashley utilized the Ignition platform to facilitate everything from the local HMI, data transfer to a remote facility, data aggregation at the remote facility, and display of the information to the customer.